#sailor moon critical

[animerunner]

Not CBR having one of the most disliked episodes in the show in terms of viewership. As one of the top 3 episodes of the entire show

I’m not joking this is an actual thing

Why does the fandom sincerely have a hard time not see Seiya just ignoring Usagis boundaries is not cute. And not good?

[western-magical-girl-confessions]

“Sailor Moon is overrated in my opinion.”

[wolf-tail]

Am I the only one who genuinely hates this damn cat??? Bullying a teenage girl every goddamn day for no good reason, being abusive to Artemis, the list goes on and on.

[harlquinzels]

-Returning here... Who decided on that? -Oh, that's right... I have a letter from Mom.

[badass-queer-couples-battle]

Congratulations to Utena and Anthy for winning the badass queer couples tournament!

Gideon and Harrow with their necromancy and swordfighting were not powerful enough to win against the revolutionary anime lesbians and the world-changing power they wield, but they still won the respectable second place in the poll. Haruka and Michiru, 90's sapphic icons and protectors of the planet, won the poll for the third place against Beauregard and Yasha (not pictured, but shoutout to them as well!)

[immortal-x-mortal-tourney]

And the ultimate battle couple is...

HIKAREN FROM REVUE STARLIGHT

With a less than 1% win over Harumichi, they have proven themselves to be the most battle couple ever.

Also congrats to Harumichi for second place!!

And our third placers, Sukka and Beauyasha!

Overall, I declare that this tournament has been a win for lesbians and whatever Sokka and Suki are. It's been fun battle coupleing with all of you!

[keeperartwork]

Hit up the Color Wheel Challenge on Twitter! This turned out great! I love the array of detailed and simplified characters here. Also made sure to hit up any characters I've never drawn before

[maesonc-artistic-adventures]

What if we kissed 😚💋😳 under the light of the red 🔴moon 🫣🥰

[saintlabrys]

Something I can't stand about this whole gender -fever or whataver is how it's cancelling/absorbing butch lesbian representation. I had been bullied my whole adolescence because of my appearance (tall and androgynous) and behaviour, I didn't have role models, mostly because many lesbian media were censored in the country in which I grew up and my family, because it belongs to a different culture, was a very conservative and traditional ones. Sometimes ago my mom told me she didn't even know homosexual people existed before moving from Albania. Growing up wasn't easy, I remember asking myself what was wrong with me and why I was a woman since everything would have been easier if I were born as a boy. That's why masc-butch representation is so dear to me and I'm angry about reinforcing gender stereotypes by saying that if you feel different from other girls you're probably not one. That's why I love Naoko Takeuchi, Creator of Sailor Moon, for stating that Haruka Tenoh (Sailor Uranus) is a girl

I love this mainly because western people want to portray her as non-binary/gender fluid or whatever just because she's very "masculine" (and also because of a manga panel, but I'll get there), I'm talking about her looking and hobbies. First of all... Androgynous women exists in real life, secondly there is no thing such as mainly hobbies but, yeah, I think I'll leave it for another post. Most people also ignore the fact that Haruka and Michiru were hugely based on Takarazuka Revue, since Takeuchi is a huge fan of it, In The Materials Collection, published in 1999, Takeuchi also revealed Haruka and Michiru were inspired by two actresses in particular but she didn't want to share their names.

What's Takarazuka review? Takarazuka Revue is a Japanese all-female musical theater that was founded in 1913. as an all-female troupe in order to attract a wider audience and fill a gap in the male-dominated theater scene. There are two kinds of actress in their plays: musumeyaku and otokoyaku. Musumeyaku are the ones who play feminine roles, while otokoyaku play the masculine ones. In order to become an otokoyaku you must have certain qualities, such as being tall. Haruka is 5'10" (180cm) and described as androgynous and act "manly". That's why Usagi and Minako when they met her they thought she was a man. Otoyaku, while training, also need to study how to "behave like a man", this comes from an article published in the late 90s:

As I said otoyaku, the majority of them at least, only play male roles, and as we said Takarazuka was born to fight a male-dominated scene. However, there's more, in the same article they spoke of otokoyaku's appeal on female audience:

Furthermore, this is what a former otokoyaku said about what being a otokoyaku really means:

Otokoyaku are the idealization of men played by women who knows what other women want!! Since Haruka character is mostly based on this idealization, this is what Takeuchi meant when in the manga she had michiru saying Haruka is "both a man and a woman", I hate seeing how this phrase is used as a gotcha by gendies when they don't even consider the social and cultural contest behind a certain media.

[blairsanne]

Updating my ita bag insert.

Before…

[tourneys-by-me]

Round Two - Pyromancy (fire) 1/8

[animerunner]

You know maybe this will make more sense when I get further in but givin Mamoru amnesia about his fighting abilities for 20 odd episodes. And then also giving him the same quest of finding the silver crystal just raises more questions.

Because like in the first episode he's for some reason he is walking around Osa-P. Which doesn't entirely make sense considering he doesn't know about the crystal at this point and probably shouldn't be looking for it because he doesn't even know he's transforming right now.

And yet they kept that same scene for his intro to Usagi.

Along with keeping Usagi's now unneceessary comment about him being a weirdo. Whcih doesn't make sense because he's running around in that green jacket we see constantly without the series

All I can think is they were maybe not honestly thinking they would have to deal with Mamoru constantly being around. Or maybe they came up with the amnesia plot last minute (which why? You didn't need that).

And it makes things really weird in earlier episodes

[shinneth]

My souring sentiments on Sailor Moon's manga

It'll be a surprise to no one who knows me even remotely that Sailor Moon was my everything back in my childhood. From the age of 9, I was utterly obsessed with it.

That was just a couple of years shy of 30 years ago.

Since then, I've often revisited the series. I watched the entirety of the Viz dub of the classic anime; all 200 episodes.

And I loved it all the same, if not more so than before. Because now I have context for why exactly the anime was the way it was, including its gradual diversion from the manga source material. And I respect the hell out of the staff who poured their life into this work, while concurrently running with the manga and doing whatever it could to not completely outpace it in the narrative.

Are there a lot of fillers in the OG anime? Yes. Too many? Well, not so from a functional standpoint (this show had to run weekly for 5 years), but there are definitely some fillers you could skip and miss nothing in doing so.

But a story like Sailor Moon honestly needed some breathing room in order to properly flesh out the cast.

Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon, the live-action reimagining of the show, was phenomenal back then (despite looking low-budget even by 2003 standards), and having re-watched the whole series recently, I can safely say PGSM more than holds up and deserves way more love and respect than it gets. It's THE perfect example of reimagining the story of Sailor Moon while still respecting its roots and maintaining the soul of the franchise.

Which is exactly why I couldn't stand Sailor Moon Crystal. We knew from the off that it was supposed to be completely faithful to the manga, but one look through @crystalvsmanga will show you Crystal took shitloads of "creative liberties", and the amount of changes I could dare to call "good"? I could count them on one hand.

The animation is low-hanging fruit, because everyone and their dog knows how godawful it was for the first two story arcs. But more than that, I actually loathed the general art design. Yukie Sakou's style DID NOT closely resemble Naoko Takeuchi's. People kept saying it, but I couldn't really see it. The eyes especially are a far cry from Takeuchi's style. And Sakou's style did NOT facilitate the OTT cartoony expressions that were definitely present in Takeuchi's manga; everyone looked so goddamn soulless, like overly-expensive porcelain dolls.

My biggest gripe with Crystal was the story, of course. While a great deal came from just being from the manga (which I'll get to in a bit), the changes they made went a long way to actively make the manga's story worse. My main takeaway from Crystal S1-2 is that it took itself waaaaay too seriously.

That being said, I did like Crystal's third season a lot better BECAUSE Chiaki Kon had way more competence and held a lot more respect for Sailor Moon. Like, my god, for once it felt like there was a soul in this show! It can actually take the piss every now and then!

Some silly things kinda broke my immersion (such as the Senshi just being able to fuckin' fly and Chibi-Moon in particular was literally sky-stepping), but most of that can be blamed on the source material it was adapting. While I was fine with Crystal3, I definitely didn't feel it was anywhere near as good as Sailor Moon S. Outside of Hotaru/Sailor Saturn having more of a presence, there wasn't really much in Crystal's take on Infinity that I liked better than S.

But most of that comes down to the fact that I liked S more than manga's Infinity arc to begin with.

Which is a good segue to talk about the manga proper.

I have not yet watched Eternal or Cosmos. the movies that adapted the last two manga arcs, but it'd be redundant since I know ahead of time what they're going to be about, and so far I haven't heard about any of them deviating from the source material, so it'd be moot to talk about them even if I had watched.

When I first got my hands on the manga, which was when I was around 12-13 and thus got the crappy MiXxZine translations, I was fine enough with it. Thought it was too fast-paced and didn't care for 99% of the villains being one-and-done jobbers, but I was also reading it with my impressions of the 90's anime characters still intact. I was reading the manga like an extension of the anime, rather than the other way around.

It wasn't until many years later when I grew older, when the manga was properly translated, when I acquired the wisdom my teenaged-ass self lacked, and learned to look at the manga as a completely separate entity that I started to see the cracks in the manga's narrative.

Further rereads have left me in something of a mindfuck, as I experienced the manga the proper way. And I realized:

The more I read the manga, the more I disliked it.

The manga is lauded for having an infinitely better depiction of Mamoru, as well as his ~Miracle Romance~ with Usagi.

Objectively, the manga definitely spends lots more time giving UsaMamo attention as a couple than any other aspect of the story...

I'd say they're also more developed as individuals in the manga too, but usually the beats, uh...

... let's say they usually ring hollow, when these two (and sometimes their daughter) are the only ones who consistently get shit done across the series. Hell, on the rare occasion that the Inner Senshi weren't rendered into street pizza, Neo Queen Serenity basically told them to fuck off and let her daughter, past self, and past hubby take on motherfucking DEATH PHANTOM/NEMESIS BY THEMSELVES.

It's likely because my first exposure to Sailor Moon was via the 90s anime, which had more of a focus on friendship and comradery between Usagi and her friends than it did her romance with Mamoru. I mean, romance was DEFINITELY a prominent thing even in that iteration of the story, but that wasn't where my interest lied. I was, am currently, and always will be more interested in Usagi's galpals than I'll ever be interested in her love life.

And, well, I'm sure this qualifies as a hot take, but...

This one moment with Usagi and Mamoru in the elevator (hell, their interaction across this entire episode was great) resonated with me far more than any ultra-romantic declarations of eternal devotion that Usagi and Mamoru kept regurgitating at each other in the manga.

Granted, the manga had a FEW moments early on where their dynamic was more playful, but they were pretty much confined to the early chapters and this element of their chemistry pretty much died not long after this.

Some say 90s anime Mamoru was far too mean-spirited in his teasing of Usagi. And I mean, sure, he was kind of a douche at times, but he usually got some karmic blowback from it (I remember one time he made Usagi cry without even really meaning to, and she cried so loud in public that randos nearby were giving Mamoru the evil-eye or a scolding). But honestly, after R, Mamoru kinda became a bland, generic love interest, just as he almost always was in the manga. The only difference was that anime Mamoru was never granted powers that were literally equal to Usagi's. The manga gave him a GOLDEN FUCKING CRYSTAL.

There was that infamous break-up arc in R that, yes, was shitty in concept and execution. But if I had anything positive to say about it, it at least shook up the status quo. It didn't make him immediately fall into the bland, generic love interest he would soon become. And it gave us some of the most emotionally-charged Usagi moments in the entire anime.

Conversely, in the manga, we had THIS shit for our UsaMamo "drama":

(the former incident with Usagi literally accusing her boyfriend of falling in love with a kid, by the way, happened while MOST OF HER FRIENDS WERE KIDNAPPED BY THE ENEMY AND COULD'VE BEEN DEAD FOR ALL SHE KNEW AND YET SHE FUCKING HAD TIME FOR THIS STUPID SHIT)

Everything seemed to revolve around Usagi and Mamoru (sometimes Chibiusa too). It lowkey came off that way at times even in the 90s anime, but in the manga or Crystal? You'd be hard-pressed to find the girls engaging in their stated hobbies at most points in time, because they're usually all together and talking about their prince and princess.

Hell, even Haruka - Sailor Uranus herself - seemed much more interested in Usagi than she ever did in Michiru, her actual girlfriend.

So... am I just missing something? I've seen people say that as they grow older, they prefer the manga/Crystal to the 90s anime. But I've never seen anyone other than myself express the opposite sentiment.

But it's true - unless I completely leave my brain at the door, I have a hard time enjoying the manga for what it is. The characters I'm most interested in or attached to quickly get swept aside for the characters I have the least interest in. No more does that ring true than the Stars arc of the manga, where Naoko Takeuchi basically speedruns killing off literally the entire cast until Sailor Moon's the only one left standing. Most characters don't even get to go out in a blaze of glory or anything - it's got nothing on the finale of the 90s anime's first season in that regard. If you're lucky, you'll get a single panel where your entire existence is ripped to shreds - but sometimes you'll be killed literally off-screen!!

There's a number of questionable manga-exclusive aspects that rubbed me the wrong way as well, such as poor Sailor Pluto being assigned as a child to guard the Door of Time in complete and total solitude. While I appreciate more Silver Millennium lore that the manga provided (the anime hardly mentioned it past the first arc), it was more than a little uncomfortable knowing the OG Queen Serenity conscripted the Inner Senshi as small children to become Princess Serenity's guardians. Really casts Queen Serenity and her Moon Kingdom in a much darker light - like maybe Queen Beryl and Queen Nehelenia had a point in trying to take them down (though the manga I believe retcons all past villains as incarnations of Chaos, so that arguably removes all prior villains' agency?). Lots of little things that I didn't think twice about, but now that I look at them again, I'm wondering WTF Naoko Takeuchi was thinking.

Though I don't want to be too hard on her. Poor girl was working under stress far longer than she'd planned to (she'd intended on ending the story either by the Dark Kingdom or Black Moon arc), so it's no surprise there's a lot of clunk and clutter in the narrative.

I often wondered if Naoko Takeuchi really wanted to make Sailor Moon with a Super Sentai-esque setup in the first place. After all, her first big hit was Sailor V, which was exclusively Minako and Artemis fighting evil with Minako having her own masked love interest she ended up being at odds with and he eventually died. With a scant few secondary characters here and there.

It led to me thinking about what Sailor Moon would be like if Naoko kept the cast to a more Sailor V-like size. That, perhaps, the Sailor Moon she really wanted to make would be quite a different beast from how we know it to be today.

So this lengthy diatribe about my personal conflicts with my waning fondness for the manga versus my strengthened love for the OG anime and live-action show was actually a preamble to a bizarre AU I wrote an outline for over a year ago but never posted in public. I had considered posting it to Sailor Moon's Reddit back then, but I (probably wisely) held off, as my musing went way off the rails.

But I figured now's a good time as any to share it here, at least. Though it'll need to be its own post since I wrote so goddamn much in this post alone, wow.

On that note, I'll end with this: The only iteration of UsaMamo that I unironically enjoyed and rooted for is...

[sjbattleangel]

Me whenever hacks like Lily Orchard go after Steven Universe, She-Ra, The Owl House, The Legend Of Korra, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Sailor Moon, Revolutionary Girl Utena, Moon Girl, Star Wars, Dungeon Meshi, ect.

(P.S: I am a massive fan of the media mentioned above) (P.S: Yes. I will fight to the end defending Steven Universe, She-Ra, The Owl House, Utena, Evangelion, Sailor Moon and The Last Jedi.)

[tbgkaru-woh]

My shop is currently open again! leftover sale on danmei, video game and TV fandom merch! we're currently moving houses as we couldn't afford our current one anymore so any sale is a huge help (both financially and by me losing a box full of merch)

PLEASE CONSIDER SHARING ♥ LINK>>

[triaelf9]

Oops I made a very specific thing for Critical Role/Sailor Moon fans XD

I hope those 5 ppl who are in the niche group of ppl who might find this very fun XD

But I also have other things in store too!